When Ramming ICE Became a Trend

In October, a politically connected illegal alien was charged with ramming ICE vehicles in Los Angeles. He was shot and wounded by an ICE officer, but after a grand jury indicted the illegal alien, an Obama judge threw out the charges.

The case was all too typical of how commonplace car attacks on ICE and immigration law enforcement had become and how sanctuary cities had conspired to legalize them.

The death of a radical leftist activist accused of attempting to ram ICE personnel with her SUV in Minneapolis, may be the first official fatality, but it’s also the inevitable result of normalizing car attacks, promoting them as a tactic and then protecting their perpetrators from the consequence. Radical judges and activist groups can protect an activist from the law, but not from a bullet, and driving a 5,000 lb SUV at armed men was always going to end one way.

Democrat officials, including Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, have tried to pretend that the fatal shooting showed that ICE is violent and “out of control.” The media has barraged viewers with that same false narrative using misleading and out of context scenes.

But there is a pattern to ICE shootings. Every ICE shooting in the last 4 months involved individuals trying to ram ICE personnel with their vehicles just like the Minneapolis case.

The media will never discuss that pattern, but it explains what happened in Minneapolis.

Even though only 41% of vehicles on the road are SUVs, many activist vehicular confrontations with ICE have involved SUVs. Why SUVs? Because they’re large and they’re favored by radicals as a tool for pursuing, blocking and confronting ICE vehicles. While fleeing illegal aliens tend to use smaller cars, activists in convoys harassing and blocking ICE invariably use SUVs.

And the confrontations between the convoys and ICE are increasingly turning violent.

Car ramming attacks, like those in Paris, New York or New Orleans, were initially a tool of Islamic terrorists before being adopted by various unstable people and finally leftists. Jihadists preferred heavier vehicles, trucks and pickup trucks, much as the anti-ICE activists adopted SUVs because of their bulk, weight and ability to block federal law enforcement access.

The initial car attacks against ICE involved illegal aliens and then fringe Hispanic nationalist activists, but by the time a white woman was shot in Minneapolis, vehicular confrontations, like reading Heather Cox Richardson and watching Jennifer Welch, had become mainstreamed among liberals. It stopped being seen as dangerous and violent and became trendy.

By late November, the Department of Homeland Security was reporting 99 car ramming incidents involving ICE and Border Patrol personnel with 4 attacks in just one single day..

The number now stands at over 100.

Some of the ICE car rammings had involved efforts by illegal aliens to escape custody, but online activists helped popularize them as an empowering way to protect illegal aliens.

The same leftists who tried to drag soccer moms into BLM activism decided to market SUV anti-ICE activism as a good way to oppose President Trump. Now a woman is dead because leftists made it seem like getting into confrontations with armed law enforcement officers while driving an SUV was a good strategy when it’s actually a good way to get shot or killed.

The same kind of confrontation with an armed law enforcement officer that might play out with a brief shove in person goes very differently when the activist is wielding a 5,000 lb vehicle and decides to drive it at a man standing in front of her. What might have played out with handcuffs and a desk appearance ticket can very quickly turn into a life and death situation.

What happened in Minneapolis was not a tragic accident, but the purpose of the exercise.

Democrats demonized ICE to protect the massive criminal illegal alien constituencies that had allowed them to take over states like California and were their best hope for seizing power in Texas. SUV confrontations with ICE were marketed to liberals as a way to protect illegal aliens.

But that was only their secondary purpose.

Much like the campaigns to block streets and confront drivers in support of BLM and then Hamas, the goal was to create chaos, generate violent confrontations, and force police intervention. The issue, as David Horowitz frequently reminded us, was not the issue, it was the revolution. BLM, Hamas or illegal aliens are vectors for radicalizing liberals into extremism through the familiar mechanisms of protest, violence, death and then terrorism and tyranny.

It’s the same exact program that played out during the sixties and seventies.

Having a ‘martyr’ will allow leftists to force Democrats to back the elimination of ICE and with it immigration enforcement, which under their administrations had barely become an afterthought, and to justify increasing violence against a law enforcement organization that they demonized.

The great mistake we made with international terrorism was to chase the terrorists instead of targeting those behind them. It would be unfortunate if we continued making the same mistake with domestic terrorists, arresting those violent, criminal or radical enough to drive their SUVs at ICE and Border Patrol personnel, instead of the political infrastructure behind it all. That’s the same mistake we made with BLM and it quickly overwhelmed local and federal law enforcement. With over 100 car ramming attacks, a number sure to continue increasing, immigration enforcement personnel rightly see themselves in the ‘line of fire’, but they will now also face pressure to avoid another fatal shooting like the one in Minneapolis.

Law enforcement personnel in the field will have seconds to decide if the moving SUV aggressively confronting them should be treated as a lethal weapon or a minor inconvenience.

That’s not fair to them. And it’s not how our society should work.

The only way to end the violence is to go after the politicians, organizations and groups inciting it. Or car ramming attacks will continue to escalate as the Left labors to organize them.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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